Month: February 2019

A Carleton University study surveyed 1,500 people across six organizations and found some interesting data points regarding emails:

Employees are spending 33% of their time on email in the workplace.

When they work from home, they spend 50% reading and answering emails.

Moore says the most surprising thing the team learned is that responses drop-off significantly for emails that use language above about a sixth grade reading level, but emails that are too simple tend to be ignored as well. A 3rd grade reading level is optimal. He was also surprised that neutral emails tend to receive fewer responses than positive or negative emails. In short, being too negative is bad, but being slightly negative is better than being boring.

The probability of closing a sale increases dramatically when a salesperson is able to (a) reach the decision maker and (b) be able to set up a meeting.

The study says, salespeople today spend anywhere from 30% to 50% on activities that have nothing to do with the actual act of selling (i.e., answering emails, meeting with clients, calling them up, doing demos, etc.).

If AI can knock that number down by 20 or 30%, total sales and the company’s revenue will be significantly impacted. I have come across apps like Respondable or Phrasee to help in snoozing mail, subject checker, sentiment analysis and reading level checkers.

The mundane, time-consuming, but still necessary task of managing email communications will largely be relegated to the machine. The upshot is that the derived benefit of just this AI tool alone is huge!

Email marketing, not just sales, will go through an AI transformation. These applications can also be used to construct newsletters, press releases, annual reports, and so on. The future of Language Processing, Predictive Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis are already converging.